Thoughts on teaching & educational technology

I’ve heard a lot about inquiry-based teaching over the last few years, most of it related to science subjects. I’ve looked at its applicability in other areas — specifically social studies — and have found a decent, but uneven field of work. There were a number of workshops at NCSS in Washington, DC, last year, and I’ve seen articles in Social Education and other publications that mention it, or supposedly focus on it. The problem I’ve run into is that there doesn’t seem to be a single definition of it — much like “one to one” laptop learning, the meaning of it entirely depends on who you’re talking with.

Anyway, I was formally introduced to historical inquiry when I started working with ABC-CLIO, our online content provider. Without bogging down in a history of how I came to be involved with them, I’ll leave it at this: I discovered with them what is now my vocabulary for describing this process, and I realized that I’d been doing parts of the model already, albeit in different forms and for different reasons.

Before going into what it is, let me say what it’s not. It’s not anything like how I learned history in high school. I took Honors World History, Honors Non-Western Civ, AP US History and AP American Government — and barring the odd activity, these were all taught by lecture. My teachers, who all seemed to really know their stuff and care about the content to some degree, delivered it to me as a package, which I was supposed to take in as a whole, preserve, and display on command. The following is a list of what I experienced in my high school social studies classes.

• Coloring maps
• Making timelines
• Debates that were based more in our opinions than facts
• Roleplays that were completely based in our opinions, and not the facts
• Many, many lectures, all accompanied by formal outlines several chalkboards long
• Answering questions at the end of each section, chapter, and unit
• Objective exams looking for my knowledge of a set list of facts
• Subjective exams seeking the correct interpretation & analysis (there’s only one, right?)

Fortunately I come from a family that values history, knowledge, and reading, and so the fact that I don’t remember learning anything in those classes probably didn’t do me much harm. It’s not that I didn’t learn anything — I’m sure I did. I just don’t remember what I learned — and I think it’s important for people to be able to take some kind of an inventory of their knowledge, otherwise it’s hard to be sure of what you might be capable of doing. And after all, if you’ve no idea what you learned, what’s the point in learning it in the first place? That’s like having a huge savings account and not knowing it exists…unless you stumble across it one day, it’s not going to do you any good.

When I started teaching I naturally took the approach that knowledge and understanding of history has value, and not just because someone, at some point, said it had value. I believe it has value in that it helps us understand contemporary issues, and helps provide perspective on how people behave by looking at how they have behaved in the past. I think, however, that the most important function of a study of history is that if done well it is the perfect laboratory in which to learn & develop thinking skills– the ability to wrestle with questions that begin with ‘how’ and ‘why.’

I’ll write more about how Social Studies classes are the perfect place for students to learn thinking skills — and what I think those skills are — in my next post.

jdg